Post of Honour (13 page)

For all his reservations, however, Paul found it hard to look upon the marriage as anything but a madcap decision, pointing out that all the Potter girls were promiscuous and that even if Hazel was of different clay she was unlikely to prove a suitable wife for an officer, even in the middle of a war fought on behalf of democracy.

Ikey’s reply to this counsel had astounded him and yet, in a way, half-convinced him. Declaring that no man other than himself had ever had access to the girl he said it was his intention, at the earliest opportunity, to resign from the Army and take a small holding on the estate, perhaps the Dell if it was vacant. As for the generally-held opinion that Hazel was dotty he would not subscribe to this and neither would Paul if he spent an hour in the company of the girl.

Paul then tried another approach, pledging responsibility for mother and child and promising Hazel a life tenancy of Mill Cottage, rent free. Ikey listened to him politely and when he had talked himself out said, quietly, ‘I suppose you find it impossible to believe I want Hazel for herself? For what she has been and is in my life?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Paul grunted. ‘I find that quite impossible to believe!’

‘Well, it’s true anyway,’ Ikey said, ‘and I realised it soon after I went overseas. Every woman I’ve met since is a bore or a harpy, especially the eligible ones! I suppose that’s what comes from being a changeling, Gov’nor?’

‘Damn it, you’re not a changeling!’ Paul yelled at him, ‘you’ve got a better brain than any of us and I’ve always been damned proud of you!’

‘Yes, I know that, Gov,’ Ikey said, ‘but the difference between you and me is that, although both of us started from the scrapyard you never worked there! Ever since I came down here as a kid I’ve had an affinity with Hazel Potter, a far closer one than I ever had with any of the jolly old Empire builders I met at school or since. In the ordinary course of events I don’t suppose I should have had the guts to turn back and appear to throw everything you’ve done for me in your face, but now it’s different! The whole damned lot of us are slithering down the slope and if I have the luck to come through, which seems to me pretty unlikely, then I’m done with pretence for good! All I shall want is a cottage, a bit of land, Hazel Potter and Hazel Potter’s kids!’

After that Paul gave up and went grumbling to Claire and she listened with impatience as he recapitulated all that Ikey had said and when he told her that he supposed they would go ahead no matter what anyone advised she snapped, ‘Nonsense! You must stop it, Paul! I won’t have Ikey marrying that trollop, I
won’t
,
do you hear?’

He said despairingly, ‘But I’ve just explained, he’ll marry her no matter what we say! He’s twenty-three, independent, and he’ll be in the trenches this time next week!’

‘I don’t care,’ she said stubbornly, ‘you mustn’t allow it! You must think of a way to stop it at once!’

‘Maybe you can think of some way,’ he said grimly and she replied, ‘Yes, I can! You can tell him that if he goes ahead with this ridiculous marriage you’ll turn the entire Potter family off their land and evict that girl from the cottage!’

‘Good God!’ he said, appalled, ‘you can’t mean that! It would be damnably unfair on Tamer’s widow and the girls, to say nothing of Jem, who’s away fighting for us!’

She said, with calculated emphasis, ‘You’ve always been a sentimental idiot, Paul, and mostly I haven’t minded because none of the issues were important enough to quarrel about. But this one is! I won’t have you and I made a laughing stock from here to Paxtonbury!’

‘Now how the devil are you involved?’ he demanded and she said that they were both deeply involved for he had sponsored the boy when he was a waif of ten or eleven and she was his wife. Marriage to a half-witted slut would hold the estate up to ridicule.

‘I don’t agree with you for a moment,’ he said, ‘but even if I did I’m damned if I’d take it out on the girl or the girl’s family! This isn’t like you, Claire! You aren’t a vindictive woman, but you’re talking just like Arabella Codsall when she came bleating to me about Will marrying the Willoughby girl all those years ago!’

‘I’m not apologising for that,’ Claire said, ‘for maybe Arabella Codsall had a point of view after all! You have always given everyone here far too much rope and let them impose upon you. Now it’s time I stepped in and cracked the whip a little for if I don’t I wouldn’t like to think what might happen when our own children grow old enough to get themselves into this kind of situation, providing they are stupid enough that is! And that isn’t all, either! The tenants are taking shameless advantage of you in all kinds of ways. They come down on us for everything nowadays and some of them are coining money out of that camp! As to this Ikey nonsense, I’ll settle that in two minutes, if you’ll back me up!’

‘I certainly won’t back you up to the extent of turning the Potters adrift!’ he retorted. ‘You can talk to Ikey if you like but you might as well understand he’s genuinely attached to the girl!’

She looked at him steadily, no longer pale and tight-lipped but with a bright pink flush on her smooth, oval face. ‘You actually believe that rubbish? Attached to a girl who won him in a ditch, a technique she probably learned from her sisters in the Dell?’

It occurred to him then that there had been a time, long years ago, when she herself had come very close to winning a man in a ditch but he knew that to remind her of the encounter beside the mere would only make a bad matter worse, so he shrugged and said:

‘You argue with Ikey. I’ve had my say and as far as I’m concerned Hazel stays in Mill Cottage, married or single! I’m damned if I’ll put her out to flatter your snobbery!’ and he stalked off, leaving her trembling with rage.

He never discovered whether or not she made a direct appeal to Ikey for no one from the Big House attended the ceremony in the parish church three days later. It was held at 8 a.m. and Ikey was gone from the Valley by afternoon. Paul heard that a number of the curious had gathered at the church, among them Henry Pitts’ big, rawboned wife and the kindhearted Mary Willoughby, who had once tried so hard to teach the bride the alphabet. Others watched the couple leave by the lych gate and drive off somewhere in Ikey’s hired motor and one of them, Rachel Eveleigh, herself due to marry in the same church that following day, told Mrs Handcock that she had never realised how beautiful Hazel Potter was and how serene she had looked as she sat smiling down at them while the bridegroom cranked the car. Ikey came in to say good-bye to Paul before driving off across the moor to catch his train but neither made a direct reference to the wedding. Ikey said, shaking hands, ‘I don’t suppose I’ll be back for at least six months, Gov’nor; if at all, that is,’ and Paul growled, ‘I wish to God the women of this Valley would be less bloody-minded and the men a bit more optimistic!’ but he wrung the boy’s hand and wished him luck.

Outside, as Ikey humped his kit into the little motor, he added, ‘I’ll keep an eye on her, Ikey!’ and Ikey replied, ‘I didn’t have to ask, Gov!’ That was all and Paul watched him swing round the bend of the drive to reappear again for a moment between the leafless chestnuts as he shot the gate. He thought, ‘What the devil does it matter anyway seeing that he’s heading for all that slush and slaughter. Somebody ought to remind Claire that she was young herself once, and a neighbour of the Potters but I’m damned if it’s going to be me! In her present mood she’d probably sulk for an extra month!’ and he went into the library and poured himself a stiff whisky.

He was standing there, his back to the fire, when Maureen came in from the terrace. She seemed very breathless, as though she had climbed the drive too quickly and she had a worried expression that looked odd on her broad, humorous face.

‘Could you go down to John?’ she said, quickly, ‘he’ll need you for an hour or so. It’s Roddy, his boy. He had a telegram about an hour ago,’ and as Paul exclaimed she said, ‘Oh, you don’t need to worry to that extent, Paul, he’s taken it on the chin, but Roddy was all he had left of his youth and a wife who died young. I think you could give him more than me. I was a latecomer in his life.’

‘Tell Claire,’ Paul said, savagely, ‘but don’t have her come fussing! She’s been damned difficult over this Ikey business,’ and slipping a bottle of his best Scotch in his pocket he hurried across the paddock to the lodge.

John was sitting in his old leather armchair beside an untended fire, the last light of the short winter’s day excluded by the closely latticed panes of the little window. He did not look grief-stricken, only small and a little shrivelled, an unlit pipe in one hand and the buff telegram form in the other.

He said, as Paul came in, ‘It was that affair off the Falklands. Our squadron was outgunned, just as I said they would be. There’ll be more naval shocks before it’s all over, mark my words. You can’t win a war by singing “Rule Britannia”, Paul!’ and he handed over the telegram containing the flat, impersonal expression of royal regret on the snuffing out of a life in its prime. Paul was to see and handle many of these telegrams in the next two years but because this was the first he read it carefully twice before laying it down.

‘I do wish you hadn’t taken Roddy’s bit of nonsense with Grace so much to heart, John,’ he said. ‘There was never anything in it, and I knew that, even at the time. We ought to have laughed him out of it and encouraged him to spend another leave here. Was he married?’

‘No, and I’ve got my own theory on that. It doesn’t matter a damn now, so I suppose I can tell you. The truth is he never really got Grace out of his mind. Does that surprise you?’

‘Yes, it does,’ Paul said, ‘for Grace never regarded him as anything more than an engaging boy. Did they meet after he left here that time?’

‘Oh yes,’ John said, ‘after the divorce they met often but you’re right, she never took him seriously. They used to dine and visit a theatre whenever he was in town or whenever he could catch her between spells in Holloway. Would you mind if I let her know about this?’

‘Not in the least,’ Paul said, ‘why should I?’ and he took glasses from the cupboard and half-filled them with his special brand of ‘Loch Leven’. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘I need one badly myself,’ and with the object of giving John something else to think about he told him of his quarrel with Claire over Ikey’s marriage.

‘She’s wrong and the boy’s right,’ John said, when he had finished, ‘for here’s another who never thought of Hazel Potter as dotty. Fey but not dotty. Anyway, who are any of us to talk about half-wittedness, when we’ve all got ourselves into this kind of mess? As for Claire, wanting to take it out on the Potter clan, I suppose I can understand that in a way.’

‘I’m damned if I can,’ said Paul, ‘it came as a shock to me that she even suggested it.’

‘It’s odd,’ John mused, sipping slowly, ‘the Valley always clung to its class distinction, even in the Lovell days. There were the Derwents and the Codsalls on either border, the workaday Pitts and Willoughbys in the middle and finally the Potters. Claire was brought up to regard the Potters as scum and I suppose they are in a way, all except Meg, who comes closer to ancient royalty than any of us. Marrying into the Big House was a triumph for High Coombe and I don’t think old Edward Derwent has ever stopped congratulating himself. The prospect of his grandsons inheriting High Coombe and every other farm in the Valley is a very unlooked for bonus and I daresay he’ll side with his daughter on this issue. Still, I ought to have a fellow feeling for him today I suppose,’ and when Paul asked why John said Roddy’s death had stirred in him memories of the boy’s mother that he thought he had forgotten and that Derwent too had lost a wife when she was about Myra’s age. ‘They were a bit alike,’ he added, ‘both pretty, dashing and maybe a little showy like poor old Roddy. It’s funny, but that kind usually burn themselves out before their time. It’s the plodders like you and me who die a little every day.’

Paul said, suddenly, ‘How do you see this war, John? As a crusade, the way most people seem to? Or more as I see it, an appalling, stupid waste, without a shred of glory about it? It hasn’t anything in common with the wars you and I fought in, you against those poor devils of savages, me against a few thousand Boers. They were incidents but this is genocide or will be if fought to a finish. Dammit, the way things are going, we shan’t have an able-bodied man left in the Valley by this time next year!’

John Rudd lit his pipe and puffed it stolidly and Paul thought he looked much as he had that summer evening he first sat there after their ride from Sorrel Halt. He took his time answering, it was not often that anyone extracted a snap judgement from John Rudd.

He said at length, ‘I happened to have professional tips from Roddy and some of his shipmates on which I based my opinion of the Navy’s unpreparedness. That doesn’t make me a wise-acre.’

‘But you were the only one who was sure they wouldn’t capture Paris,’ Paul reminded him and John said: ‘I’ll be sixty next year; apart from the Zulu campaign I’ve lived all those sixty years in Britain. A man ought to learn something about his own people in more than half a century. He’d be a damned dull dog if he didn’t!’

‘What did you learn that makes you so cocksure, John? For you are cocksure, aren’t you?’

‘About the outcome? Yes, I am. We’ll win all right though I don’t know that it will do us much good in the end. I suppose I’ve seemed to you to take the war in my stride because I’ve been anticipating it so long and there isn’t much point in arguing the rights and wrongs of an inevitability. The line-up started round about the time you settled here and if it hadn’t been poor little Belgium this year, it would have been poor old Turkey next year, or hands off India the year after that! Now it’s here the only thing left is to hold on and the British do that much better than most of them!’

‘It looks to me as if it’s all that’s left to us,’ Paul said, ‘so what makes you confident about us getting anything better than a stalemate or a compromise peace?’

‘Ah no,’ John said quickly, ‘you can rule that out! A nation that achieves all this one has in a century has to have special qualities and I don’t say that in the spirit of somebody paid to write for the popular press, it’s just a feeling, down here,’ and he tapped his paunch with his pipe-stem.